Yes. Those scientists, who address the question of "something from nothing", necessarily assume an omniscient view of eternal existence prior to the Big Bang. For example, a Multiverse, of which our 'verse is merely one of zillions, is necessarily eternal, in order to escape the question of "how do you account for something new and without precedence?" In the multiverse model, a Creator (from scratch) is not necessary. because what you see now, is what has always existed in one form or another. But then, who created the Multiverse, or was it self-created? That eternal power to create new worlds is uncannily god-like. :joke:Of course, the entire question also seems to presuppose some sort of "God's Eye View" through which all truth corresponds to facts of being. — Count Timothy von Icarus
But he seems to be in favor of “transcendental framing” of the FreeWill question, — Gnomon
So, you agree that the ultimate source of “habitual” [regular, reliable] behaviors, rather than acquired in the process of evolution, could inferred as laws of nature [necessities] that predate the Bang. By that I mean, if-then instructions for system operation that were programmed into the seed (Singularity) of the Big Bang? — Gnomon
That “duh, everybody knows about heat death” conclusion came as a surprise to Einstein, who assumed a stable and eternal universe in his calculations. And only when faced with contrary evidence, was forced to rename his Cosmological Constant as what we now know as Dark Energy. — Gnomon
To me, that “explanation” is what he is arguing against -- saying “they come to look less like explanations than descriptions". In other words, describing the effect is not the same as explaining the cause. — Gnomon
Those who prefer to call those dependable regularities “habits” are implying that they could have been otherwise. — Gnomon
But how would they know that, except by re-running the program of evolution several times to see if each execution followed the same basic path. — Gnomon
All we know for sure is that Nature seems to be constrained by built-in limitations. So, if you imagine a reality with different constraints you will be dealing with imaginary “woo”, rather than with Reality as we know it. — Gnomon
Many things we once considered brute facts have turned out to be explained by even more fundemental forces and particles. The onion keeps being peeled back. A lack of ability to progress in explanation does not mean there is no deeper explanation. — Count Timothy von Icarus
In reading a lot of this thread, it strikes me that the many competing theoretical physics models of how the Big Bang might have occured are not particularly useful for answering this question in the sense it is often asked.
Swerve and symmetry breaking as causal explanations don't get at the more essential question: why is there something rather than nothing? From whence all this matter and energy? Or, as important of a question, why does it behave the way it does?
It's unclear to me if physics can give us an answer on this. Physics is the study of relationships between physical forces, but how can it study why those relationships are what they are? — Count Timothy von Icarus
The problem with setting up the existence of matter and energy, or their fundemental behaviors as "brute facts," is twofold.
1. Many things we once considered brute facts have turned out to be explained by even more fundemental forces and particles. The onion keeps being peeled back. A lack of ability to progress in explanation does not mean there is no deeper explanation.
2. This answer is highly unsatisfactory, and explanations of theoretical models with varying levels of empirical support and claims of predictive power all amount to so much window dressing on "I don't know, it is what it is."
Of course, the entire question also seems to presuppose some sort of "God's Eye View" through which all truth corresponds to facts of being. I am not so sure this sort of correspondence epistemology actually makes any sense. On the one hand, it seems beset by the skepticism that has hung like a cloud over modern philosophy, "how can I be sure of anything except for my internal states," and on the other it takes a view of knowledge as somehow pure and ahistorical, when it appears that knowledge is more something that evolved and changes forms over time. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Was that transcendent "intentional" perspective inevitable : due to an accidental structure of the Singularity, or to an intentional arrangement of its structure? Is Life-Mind-Intention a product of combining matter with physical laws? If so, which? And in what proportions? :smile:He means that life and mind transcend their worlds by being organisms with an intentional point of view. — apokrisis
Well, duh! The structural regularities of our universe are necessarily immanent in the structure of the system. But how the system arrived at that highly-unlikely anthropic structure is an open question. Apparently. by "chaos of possibility" you mean that a human-friendly universe is an astronomical accident. That would be a Weak Anthropic argument. And the Las Vegas odds, of such a cosmic-coincidence-of-initial-conditions occurring in finite time (in eternity anything possible must happen), are a bad bet. Therefore, the theory of Inflation was proposed to cover the bet in a fraction of a Planck second. But, if you believe in such Voila!-instant-universe-from-nothing Magic, I have some prime real estate in Afghanistan to sell you. :joke:Nope. The structuralist view is just arguing that the regularities of nature are immanent rather than transcendent. They emerge from the chaos of possibility as structural inevitabilities, rather than being God-given laws that animate matter. — apokrisis
I agree. To assume that Life & MInd & Intention & Love emerged from "the chaos of possibilities" is believable, only if that infinite Chaos was limited & enformed by the logical structure of Cosmos. Therefore, the infinite potential of Chaos and the finite structure of Cosmos logically must exist prior to the actualization of potential and the realization of Cosmos in the Big Bang. And that priority is what I would call "Transcendent", in that neither Infinity nor cosmic potential can be found immanent in the actual universe we inhabit. So, Transcendence wins by a mile. Yet, it is still Structuralism. :nerd:The contest here is between two ways of looking at the metaphysics of Being - the transcendent and the immanent. And it is not even a contest. — apokrisis
So, Transcendence wins by a mile. Yet, it is still Structuralism. :nerd: — Gnomon
And the Las Vegas odds, of such a cosmic-coincidence-of-initial-conditions occurring in finite time (in eternity anything possible must happen), are a bad bet. — Gnomon
I don't know why an intentional universe creator would bother to instigate a messy world like ours. But I have a theory, based on my Enformationism worldview. It's obvious to me that the mythical creator of the idyllic Garden of Eden is a fairy tale. Other ancient creation myths included the imperfect workman Demiurge of Plato, or the Gnostic's evil god Ialdabaoth. Those gods were not Omnipotent or Omni-benign, and their creative deficiencies are reflected in the imperfect world we inhabit today.Why would the Big Daddy in the Sky go to all the trouble of pre-arranging an anthropically structured Big Bang that takes 13 billion years to eventually deliver the fleeting blip of a biofilm on some random chunk of real estate? — apokrisis
the real world has both good & bad properties, from the human perspective, — Gnomon
Math includes both positive and negative values. — Gnomon
Since Reason, Character, and Emotion are characteristics of our world, specifically the Cultural aspects instead of the Natural properties, the First Cause must have possessed the Aristotelian Potential for those same qualities. — Gnomon
As a result of programming a Singularity with design parameters (laws & initial conditions), a prolonged process of Evolution began, and will have an end. The End will be the output of the program. And, due to the inherent randomizing uncertainties, presumably even the Programmer does not know exactly what the Final Answer will be — Gnomon
So, my story can only be judged by its philosophical explanatory power, not by its empirical evidence. — Gnomon
I don't emphasize the "good and bad", because my philosophy is BothAnd. It acknowledges the Duality of Reality, but "reduces" to a Monism in Holism. :smile:To talk of "good and bad" is way too simplistic - a dualism that wants to be reduced to a monism. . . . Your argument falls apart before it gets started if it is couched in merely anti-symmetric terms like positive-negative and good-bad. — apokrisis
No, I don't believe the Creator is the "determiner of every detail". Instead, the Programmer created an evolutionary program that works out the details via trial & error, not magical intervention. :cool:But you are taking things back to a simplistic religious framing that just accepts there is a problem of evil, or a problem if a creator isn't the determiner of every detail. — apokrisis
You have missed the whole point of the Enformationism worldview. An Evolutionary Program is not "deterministic", but it is teleological, in that there is an Intention (goal) that drives the Selection of the fittest. No "desperation: needed, just a modicum of Reason. :nerd:But talking of a programmer immediately makes chance a big metaphysyical problem. Computers are deterministic devices. Chance doesn't even enter the story. And to claim some "swerve" to introduce uncertainty is a patent act of desperation. — apokrisis
A symmetry break does indeed begin with a duality, as in the mitosis of a cell : one becomes two. But that's just the first step. For example, a single stem cell has the potential to evolve into a variety of functional cells. The antique notion of a "swerve" was just an attempt to explain how a linear process could become non-linear. For example light always travels in a straight line --- until it encounters curved space, that is. :joke:But what we see is that most folk get stuck at the first step - a symmetry breaking that only speaks of two directions at the one scale of being. — apokrisis
I'm sorry. But you won't have a clue what my "story" predicts, until you have heard the whole story. The Enformationism website is just the first chapter. The rest of the story is told in an ongoing series of blogs. I think you are confusing my 21st century creation myth with the traditional stories of creation, that are steeped in Magic instead of Science. :halo:So your story predicts neither what physics has figured out about the start of the Universe, nor what sociology has figured out about the organisation of biological collectives. — apokrisis
In the Enformationism worldview, the Big Bang "division" was also "complementary" (BothAnd). The only "transcendence" is in the sense that a Programmer transcends the Program. You might say that the metaphysical Intention (Will) of the Programmer is embodied in the physical expression of the evolutionary program. To wit : Mental Information (Idea, Form, Concept), is transformed into Causal EnFormAction (Energy), which then transforms into the physical expression of the original concept (Matter, Sculpture). Just as a pool shooter is not on the table, only the First Cause transcends the Effect : an evolving chain of Causation. Can your "triadic" scale explain the Big Bang without reference to some prior Agency? Could our finite evolving universe be it's own Cause? :smirk:Productive metaphysics instead continues on from this kind of "dualism yearning to be monism" to a fully-broken dichotomy - one with the asymmetry of a hierarchical or triadically-developed scale. The division has to be complementary - mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive - so that all its causes are to be found within it. No need for transcendence. — apokrisis
No. I am not a scientist, nor a mathematician. I'm just an amateur philosopher, who created his own personal worldview -- for his own private personal use -- based on a layman's unfettered alchemy of Quantum Queerness and Information Ubiquity. My Enformationism philosophy is not grounded in any particular model of physics or cosmology. Instead, it combines elements of a variety of both ancient & modern models, and both philosophical & physical concepts. But, they are all bound together, into a whole system, by the notion that Information is the fundamental element of the real world. The key influences of my model can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, and the conceptual offshoots of those seeds have survived the weeding-out process of both Natural and Cultural Evolution.↪Gnomon
Does your approach have any connection to Wolfram’s cellular automata theory or Deutsch’s constructor theory? There is a lot of maths in this area - genetic algorithms, edge of chaos, critical systems, etc. Do you ground things in some model? — apokrisis
If the Enformationism thesis is "grounded" in any model, it would be the recent revelation of Matter-Energy-Information equivalence. And that equation crosses the artificial boundaries between Scientific, Philosophical, and Religious worldviews. :nerd: — Gnomon
Speaking of which, Darwin's notion of "survival of the fittest" applies, not just to physical organisms, but also to metaphysical concepts. — Gnomon
But, they are all bound together, into a whole system, by the notion that Information is the fundamental element of the real world. — Gnomon
The problem I see with that is that the sole criteria for success in evolutionary theory is just to survive and to procreate. — Wayfarer
So 'the sage' or the 'awakened being' is in some sense the culmination of that whole process of cosmic evolution. — Wayfarer
Darwinian evolution is just an extension of a process or structural view of metaphysics generally — apokrisis
In 1893 Peirce used the word "agapism" for the view that creative love is operative in the cosmos. Drawing from the Swedenborgian ideas of Henry James, Sr. which he had absorbed long before, Peirce held that it involves a love which expresses itself in a devotion to cherishing and tending to people or things other than oneself, as parent may do for offspring, and as God, as Love, does even and especially for the unloving, whereby the loved ones may learn **. Peirce regarded this process as a mode of evolution of the cosmos and its parts, and he called the process "agapasm", such that: "The good result is here brought to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous energy by the parent upon the offspring, and, second, by the disposition of the latter to catch the general idea of those about it and thus to subserve the general purpose." Peirce held that there are three such principles and three associated modes of evolution:
"Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agapism." — Agapism
"Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. — Wayfarer
Physics suggests information is more fundamental than matter, energy, space and time – the problems start when we try to work out what that means — Gnomon
‘information’ is too poorly defined to be meaningful in the context. — Wayfarer
But as that New Scientist article so adroitly points out, the result is confusion piled upon confusion. — Wayfarer
That is not the definition of ‘information’, That is your definition.
‘The many live each in their own private world, whilst those who are awake have but one world in common’ ~ Heraclitus. — Wayfarer
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